Aerospike Wants to Bring NoSQL to Finance in a Big Way

Renee Caruthers reports in FierceFinanceIT, “As financial companies increasingly leverage big data, they have explored and embraced non-relational databases for their most advanced analytics. But NoSQL database provider Aerospike envisions bigger use cases in finance. ‘There is a huge amount of investment in those technologies for analytics uses, and it’s easier to go to market with, but the operational use case where you are really part of a business in a core way and every transaction flows through you, they are still using mainframes for that, so we thought that was a more interesting under-invested in area,’ says Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike CTO and co-founder.”

Caruthers goes on, “Aerospike designed its distributed in-memory database technology to support what it calls ‘speed at scale.’ The six-year-old company got its start with ad tech companies that needed to serve and analyze ads moment-by-moment in an Internet environment across vast numbers of sites. For financial firms faced with merging the world of sophisticated analytics and massive speed demands with settlement systems operating from relational databases in mainframe systems, Aerospike aims to bridge that gap. Its early forays into the financial services world are in augmenting mainframe environments. ‘You need a lot of your back office settlement systems for compliance reasons to still be in databases and traditional relational mainframe systems, and that’s not going away. But those things can’t take the read load if you are doing advanced risk calculations and if you are doing things like mobile retail brokerage loads. You can’t hit the mainframe every single time someone brings up their app’.”